V.

"I like," Profane continued, "living off of your money. But you and Paola conned me into coming here."

"First things first," said Stencil. The rain had stopped; he was nervous. "See Maijstral. See Maijstral."

See Maijstral he did: but only next day, and after a morning-long argument with the whisky bottle which the bottle lost. He walked to the room in the ruined building through a brilliant gray afternoon. Light seemed to cling to his shoulders like fine rain. His knees shook.

But it wasn't hard to talk to Maijstral.

"Stencil has seen your confession to Paola."

"Then you know," Maijstral said, "I only made it into this world through the good offices of one Stencil."

Stencil hung his head. "It may have been his father."

"Making us brothers."

There was wine, which helped. Stencil yarned far into the night but with a voice always threatening to break, as if now at last he were pleading for his life. Maijstral kept a decorous silence, waiting patiently whenever Stencil faltered.

Stencil sketched the entire history of V. that night and strengthened a long suspicion. That it did add up only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects. At one point in Mondaugen's story:

"Ah," Maijstral said. "The glass eye."

"And you." Stencil mopped his forehead. "You listen like a priest."

"I have wondered." Smiling.

At the end of it:

"But Paola showed you my apologia. Who is the priest? We have heard one another's confessions."

"Not Stencil's," Stencil insisted. "Hers."

Maijstral shrugged. "Why have you come? She is dead."

"He must know."

"I could never find that cellar again. If I could: it must be rebuilt now. Your confirmation would lie deep."

"Too deep already," Stencil whispered. "Stencil's long over his head, you know."

"I was lost."

"But not apt to have visions."

"Oh, real enough. You always look inside first, don't you, to find what's missing. What gap a vision could possibly fill. I was all gap then, and there was too wide a field to choose from."

"Yet you'd just come from -"

"I did think of Elena. Yes. Latins warp everything to the sexual anyway. Death becomes an adulterer or rival, need arises to see one rival at least done in . . . But I was bastardized enough, you see, before that. Too much so to feel hatred or triumph, watching."

"Only pity. Is that what you mean? At least in what Stencil read. Read into. How can he -"

"More a passiveness. The characteristic stillness, perhaps, of the rock. Inertia. I'd come back - no, in - come in to the rock as far as I would."

Stencil brightened after a while and changed course. "A token. Comb, shoe, glass eye. The children."

"I wasn't watching the children. I was watching your V. What I did see of the children - I recognized none of the faces. No. They may have died before the war ended or emigrated after it. Try Australia. Try the pawnbrokers and curio shops. But as for placing a notice in the agony column: 'Anyone participating in the disassembly of a priest -'"

"Please."

Next day, and for days after, he investigated the inventories of curio merchants, pawnbrokers, ragmen. He returned one morning to find Paola brewing tea on the ring for Profane, who lay bundled up in bed.

"Fever," she said. "Too much booze, too much everything back in New York. He hasn't been eating much since we arrived. God knows where he does eat. What the water there is like."

"I'll recover," Profane croaked. "Tough shit, Stencil."

"He says you're down on him. "

"O God," said Stencil.

The next day brought momentary encouragement to Stencil. A shopowner named Cassar did know of an eye such as Stencil described. The girl lived in Valletta, her husband was an auto mechanic at the garage which cared for Cassar's Morris. He had tried every device he knew to purchase the eye, but the foolish girl would not part with it. A keepsake, she said.

She lived in a tenement. Stucco walls, a row of balconies on the top floor. Light that afternoon produced a "burn" between whites and blacks: fuzzy edges, blurrings. White was too white, black too black. Stencil's eyes hurt. Colors were nearly absent, leaning either to white or black.

"I threw it into the sea." Hands on hips, defiant. He smiled uncertainly. Where had Sidney's charm fled? Under the same sea, back to its owner. Light angling through the window fell across a bowl of fruit - oranges, limes - bleaching them and throwing the bowl's interior to black shadow. Something was wrong with the light. Stencil felt tired, unable to pursue it further - not just now - wanting only to leave. He left.

Profane sat in a worn flowered robe of Fausto Maijstral's, looking ghastly, chewing on the stump of an old cigar. He glared at Stencil. Stencil ignored him: threw himself on the bed and slept soundly for twelve hours.

He awoke at four in the morning and walked through a sea-phosphorescence to Maijstral's. Dawn leaked in, turning the illumination conventional. Along a mudway and up twenty steps. A light burned.